All the kings horses and all the kings men are working really hard of late.
Here is Naked Capitalism on the attempts of the powers that be to salvage something from the Bond Insurances companies.
Here is Tanta on how the Government’s Sponsored Agencies are going to go about guaranteeing Jumbo mortgages in an attempt to provided stimulus.
And here is Brad Setser to remind us once again why we have not crashed yet.
There was a strong wind in northern New York on Sunday and it caused a mass causality event in Rochester. This from America’s North Shore Journal….
At about 12:38 p.m. EST today, the Monroe County 911 Center received a cellphone call reporting a 20 car pileup on I390. In the next few moments, a dozen more calls flooded in. Gates Volunteer Fire and Volunteer Ambulance were dispatched.
Just six minutes later a State Police officer on scene requested “as many EMS rigs as possible”. As late as 12:50 a caller reported that collisions were still occurring.
Gates responded, declared a Mass Casualty Incident, and additional resources were requested. The professionals in Monroe County and Rochester City Fire and EMS responded. Chili, Churchville, Greece, Henrietta were among the initial responders from the local region. Rochester City Fire and Airport Rescue responded with extrication tools and manpower. The commercial agencies, Rural Metro and Monroe Ambulance sent ambulances and personnel.
It’s flu season. The local hospitals were jammed. Space was made, people called in, trauma beds made available. One by one the ambulances rolled out with the injured.
Apparently the total number of cars involved in this accident was 36.
This demonstrates why you will be on your own in any major disaster. If 36 cars can strain first responders, just think what would happen if hundreds or thousands of people got hurt.
The Silverware thief sent this link to a New York Times article on a strange disease that occurred in a large scale slaughter house. The heart of the article is this….
On Nov. 28, Dr. DeVries’s boss, Dr. Ruth Lynfield, the state epidemiologist, toured the plant. She and the owner, Kelly Wadding, paid special attention to the head table. Dr. Lynfield became transfixed by one procedure in particular, called “blowing brains.”
As each head reached the end of the table, a worker would insert a metal hose into the foramen magnum, the opening that the spinal cord passes through. High-pressure blasts of compressed air then turned the brain into a slurry that squirted out through the same hole in the skull, often spraying brain tissue around and splattering the hose operator in the process.
Read the whole article if you want to find out how this process caused some factory workers to come down with serious medical problems.
This week’s essay of the week calls to mind this bit of poetry from The Modern Traveller by Hilaire Belloc. I have to admit that I find it impossible to separate the irony implicit in the Modern Traveller from Belloc’s debates with H. G. Wells.
We here at the Ethereal Voice don’t much care for the factory method of educating kids. But if you are going to throw 30 odds kids and put them under one teacher, it is foolish to make them 30 odd kids with vastly different needs. The only way one teacher can have a hope teaching 30 kids is if their needs are roughly similar.
This is the basic fact of life that lies behind Scott Walker’s rant. Only, he wants to save public schools so we don’t think that he shares our views on factory education.
Here is question to confound the theologians of our modern civil religion.
It is an article of faith in our civil religion that democracy should be imposed in any and all situations. No other form of government is valid. Therefore, should we not be pushing hard for democracy in Rwanda?
Read this excellent essay and consider the question.
Derek has an interesting post up discussing the failure of the drug torcetrapib in clinical trials. I found these two paragraphs particularly interesting….
And that’s about where knowledge of this field stops among the general population, and I can understand why, because it gets pretty ferocious after that point. As with everything else in living systems, the closer you look, the more you see. There are, for starters, several subforms of HDL, the main alpha fraction and at least three others. And there are at least four types of alpha. At least sixteen lipoproteins, enzymes, and other proteins are distributed in various ratios among all of them. We know enough to say that these different HDL particles vary in size, shape, cholesterol content, origin, distribution, and function, but we don’t know anywhere near as much as we need to about the details. There’s some evidence that instead of raising HDL across the board, what you want to do is raise alpha-1 while lowering alpha-2 and alpha-3, but we don’t really know how to do that.
How does HDL, or its beneficial fraction(s) help against atherosclerosis? We’re not completely sure about that, either. One of the main mechanisms is probably reverse cholesterol transport (RCT), the process of actually removing cholesterol from the arterial plaques and sending it to the liver for disposal. It’s a compelling story, currently thought to consist of eight separate steps involving four organ systems and at least six different enzymes. The benefits (or risks) of picking one of those versus the others for intervention are unknown. For most of those steps, we don’t have anything that can selectively affect them yet anyway, so it’s going to take a while to unravel things. Torcetrapib and the other CETP inhibitors represent a very large (and very risky) bet on what is approximately step four.
Plumbing the depths has a new post up. Good news is that he has been down because business has been so good he did not have much time. But this lack of time has also caused him to have a little trouble with the powers that be….
The best part, as always, was dealing with the Inland Revenue. In all the huff and puff of plumbing I had forgotten to send in our annual PAYE return. Since we don’t pay PAYE I wasn’t overly concerned and, when I finally I remembered, I popped on-line and sent ‘the-powers-that-be’ a series of zero’s. Three weeks later I received a letter thanking me for sending them nothing but informing me that I had been fined £100 for sending them nothing far too late. Before I could get annoyed with this, I received another letter to tell me that the Revenue was going to pay me £200 for shunning the old paper-based system and not sending them anything ‘on-line’. This was very nice of them, so I rang up and asked if they could just deduct the fine from the reward and send me a cheque for £100. Surprisingly enough they didn’t have a problem with this and two weeks later I received the cheque. Then, just as I was beginning the think that the Inland Revenue wasn’t quite the bureaucratic monster everyone said it was, I received another, rather stroppy letter, pointing out that the Inland Revenue had had to send me a cheque for £100 and telling me to get my act together and make sure I didn’t over pay them again next year!
Mr. Dueck has a new poem up. Not his best ever, but we like to encourage new work.
The hysteria on the on the political right that makes radical Islam out to be this great horrible threat is a dangerous thing. It is dangerous because it obscures the real problem. Even if radical Islam was wiped off the face of the earth, western society would still be in danger of collapsing. The problem is not that radical Islam is so dangerous but that western society is so rotten.
Popular conservative columnist Rod Dreher comes close to admitting as much in his rant entitled Dildos versus scimitars.